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SUMMARY This volume contains papers presented at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Dubrovnic, Croatia, 2005), with some additionally solicited articles from leading experts in cognitive linguistics.

The collection begins with an introduction by the editors, providing the background, aim, and a preview of the book. The collection aims to 'illustrate the main lines of development in cognitive linguistics, namely, the ever-present focus on research within linguistics proper and expansions into other fields in inquiry' (p.2). The remaining fourteen chapters are grouped into three parts: Part 1, Setting the scene, Part 2, Consolidating the paradigm, Part 3, Expanding the paradigm.

Part 1: Setting the scene In chapter 1, "Convergence in cognitive linguistics", Ronald W. Langacker addresses the converging and diverging tendencies in cognitive linguistics. Through a discussion of the relations between various central notions in cognitive linguistics such as metaphor, metonymy, blending theory, cognitive grammar and construction grammar, the author argues that the overall tendency has been toward convergence, integration and unification. Langacker also mentions that cognitive linguistics has undergone expansion by drawing on methods, findings and empirical support from other disciplines such as computer science, neurology, psychological experimentation, etc. Finally, the expansion can also be seen in the fact that cognitive linguistics has broadened its scope to include issues like sociolinguistics, phonology, topology, universals, and so forth.

In chapter 2, "An overview of cognitive linguistics", Antonio Barcelona and Javier Valenzuela present a detailed overview of various key issues in the development of cognitive linguistics. The issues touched upon are: its background as a reaction against generative approaches; its theoretical tenets including non-modularism and a non-objectivist, blueprint view of linguistic meaning; the consequent methodological principles such as relying on general human cognitive abilities (e.g. prototype-based categorization), and blurring the distinction between encyclopedic, experience-based knowledge and linguistic meaning; the main directions and current tendencies in cognitive linguistics and their applications including construction grammars, polysemy, metaphor, metonymy and blending. Finally, the authors identify remaining problems and future research in cognitive linguistics -- to what extent it is cognitive, how to address the social aspects of language processing, the formalization problem of construction grammar, the psychological plausibility of the cognitive explanation of polysemy, the distinction, interaction and typology of metaphor and metonymy, and experimental support for blending theory.

Part 2: Consolidating the paradigm In chapter 3, "Pattern versus process concepts of grammar and mind: A cognitive-functional perspective", Jan Nuyts focuses on a contentious issue between cognitive linguistics and more traditional functional linguistics: cognitive linguistics mainly adopts a pattern- or construction-oriented approach to grammar, while classical functionalism's approach to grammar relies more on rules or process. Contrary to arguments by cognitive grammarians like Langacker and Croft who claim that the process concept is misguided, Nuyts, through an in-depth analysis of various theoretical views and the complex relationship between process vs. construction concepts of grammar, argues that the two models are not only compatible but also represent complementary perspectives on the same phenomenon.

In chapter 4, "Metaphor in language and thought: How do we map the field?", Gerard J. Steen addresses issues related to metaphor within one coherent theoretical framework which can serve as a map for researchers to gain a clearer understanding of metaphor in language and thought. First, he distinguished three dimensions of doing metaphor research, i.e. metaphor can be studied as part of grammar or usage, or/and as part of language or thought, or/and as part of sign systems or behavior. Second, on the basis of these three dimensions, Steen differentiates eight areas of research that have their own assumptions about metaphorical meaning. The author points out that metaphor research in these distinct areas is supported by various kinds of evidence collected with different methods, so converging evidence for metaphor in one area may be controversial in another.

In chapter 5, "Emotion and desire in independent complement clauses: A case study from German", Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda L. Thornburg concentrate on the interface between grammatical form and its pragmatic function and explore to what extent sentence meaning are compositional and to what extent is inferential, that is, elaborated through metaphoric, metonymic and/or pragmatic inference. They base their discussion on independent complement clauses which show a mismatch between form and pragmatic function because "independent" speech acts are communicated by "dependent" syntactically dependent structures. The authors conclude that meaning is less compositional than traditionally assumed; meanings are dynamically constructed through cognitive operations involving world knowledge, belief systems; syntax is partially motivated.

In chapter 6, "Schematic meaning of the Croatian verbal prefix iz-: Meaning chains and syntactic implications", Branimir Belaj offers a semantic analysis of the Croatian verbal prefix iz-. Drawing on a small corpus, he proposes that all these iz-prefixed verbs share the schematic meaning "transition from an intralocative to an extralocative position", and together they form a radial network/category, with different members located in different nodes of the network, some being more prototypical while others more peripheral.

Based on a representative sample of English and Spanish bahuvrihi compounds, in chapter 7, "The conceptual motivation of bahuvrihi compounds in English and Spanish", Antonio Barcelona presents a more refined interpretation and cognitive interpretation of exocentric bahuvrihi compounds whose explanation requires more than just pointing out the involvement of metonymy. Specifically, he argues that the exocentric nature of these compounds is motivated by the metonymy CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTY FOR CATEGORY, and the property itself can be conceptualized literally, metonymically, or metaphtonymically. This chapter also touches on the relations between the semantics of bahuvrihi compounds and their grammatical and prosodic form.

In chapter 8, "On the subject of impersonals", Ronald W. Langacker elaborates on the impersonal "it", which he claims to be meaningful. He provides an insightful analysis of "it" and the constructions containing it by comparing it with related constructions and other pronouns. He postulates a cognitive model called the "control cycle" to explain it. His main proposal is that "'it' profiles the relevant field, i.e. the conceptulizer's scope of awareness for the issue at hand" (p.207).

Part 3: Expanding the paradigm In chapter 9, "Do people infer the entailments of conceptual metaphors during verbal metaphor understanding?", Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. and Luciane C. Ferreira summarize research supporting and critique raised against conceptual metaphor theory concerning a wide range of issues in this area, and then go on to report an exploratory study testing ordinary speaker's intuitions to investigate the psychological issue of "whether people understand one, some, or all of the possible meaning entailments associated with a conceptual metaphor when they process conventional expressions motivated by that conceptual metaphor" (p.228). The experiment confirms cognitive linguists' view that people have mental representations of conceptual metaphors which play a role in their interpretations of metaphoric language. The authors caution cognitive linguists to take psycholinguistic findings into consideration in their research.

The next two chapters argue for the effectiveness of corpus-based approach in cognitive linguistics. In chapter 10, "Corpus data in usage-based linguistics: What's the right degree of granularity for the analysis of argument structure constructions?", Stefan Th. Gries takes up the issue of which hierarchical level or amount of granularity in corpora is most fruitful. Based on corpus data from the British Component of the International Corpus of English, he evaluates the degree to which distinctions between lemmas and inflectional forms, as well as between data from different registers are merited in the analysis of the semantics of argument structure constructions. He concludes that seemingly meaningful linguistic distinctions do not necessarily result in expected meaningful differences and advocates a bottom-up method for usage-based studies that would reveal most relevant differences in patterning. In view of cognitive linguists' strong commitment to usage-based model, in chapter 11, "Cognitive linguistics meets the corpus", Anatol Stefanowitsch justifies the need for cognitive linguistics to embrace and get their hands dirty with "authentic, richly structured and inescapably messy usage data" (p.285). Firstly, he illustrates how corpus data and methods can be utilized to examine properties of the linguistic system, e.g. to assess the acceptability of a specific expression; then, he exemplifies how quantitative corpus-linguistic method can be interpreted within a usage-based model by presenting a method called collostructional analysis which is helpful for understanding the semantics of constructional patterns.

In chapter 12, "Oops blush! Beyond metaphors of emotion", Heli Tissari weighs Silvan Tomkins's claim that affect is constituted directly by the responses of the body to stimulation against key notions of conceptual metaphor theory, especially Zoltán Kövecses's research on the metonymic, embodied basis of emotion metaphors. Focusing on the affect of shame, the author demonstrates in great detail how studies on conceptual metaphors and an interpretation of affect as a fundamentally embodied phenomenon might crossfertilize each other.

Chapter 13, "Conceptual construal and social construction" by Peter Harder, shifts the focus from internal grounding of concepts, i.e. the experiential basis of embodiment of concepts, to discussion of the social aspects of linguistic cognition, i.e. "the processes that are at work when 'emerged' concepts acquire a role in the social process" (p.306), an orientation gaining increasing attention in the last decade (see Harder 2010). The similarity of conceptual construal and social construction lies in their refusal of objective properties as the determinant of the content of understanding, and the acknowledgement of the important role of human factors. Their divergence lies in the fact that social construction stresses the social pressures for conceptualization, while conceptual construal emphasizes bodily grounding of human cognition. Instead of treating them as contradictory, Harder aims to "provide an overall framework that integrates hard facts as well as processes of social construction with the conceptual domain that constitutes the heartland of cognitive linguistics (p.322). With an analysis of the "cartoon crisis" in Denmark, Harder illustrates how the new framework, combining both conceptual factors and social processes, can help us gain a deeper understanding of conceptualization in communication.

In chapter 14, "The biblical story retold: A cognitive linguistic perspective", Zoltán Kövecses offers a cognitive linguistic-based reinterpretation of the central symbols and the basic story of the Bible. The author, by identifying several major metaphors and metonymies, explains in detail how the symbolic meaning of the basic story is interpreted and how these metaphors and metonymies operate in the interpretation. What distinguishes Kövecses's method from other perspectives is his claim that people's understanding of the symbolic meaning of the Bible story relies on conceptual structures and conceptual mechanisms shared by a large number of language users in the European cultural zone. Moreover, he argues that the conceptual structures and conceptual mechanisms of Bible interpretation are not unique and thus are no difference from the cognitive apparatus people utilize every day.

EVALUATION This book is a much-needed and timely addition to the fast-growing multidisciplinary endeavor of the field, representing both state-of-the-art research and cutting-edge studies in cognitive linguistics proper and its expansion into other fields of inquiry.

The two chapters in part 1 give a good overview of cognitive linguistics, helpful especially for novices in cognitive linguistics. Langacker optimistically points to the possibility of coherence and unification but only mentions numerous works to support his point. With Langacker's contribution as a guide, readers have to consult those works to see how unification and convergence can be achieved. Chapter 2's survey gives equal treatments to the main areas of cognitive linguistics (construction grammars, lexico-semantic networks, and conceptual metaphor and metonymy and blending), their applications and future research. However, this chapter does not comment on diverging or converging tendencies and does not cover how cognitive linguistics integrates with other disciplines.

The chapters in the second part aim to show converging tendencies within cognitive linguistics itself, and this goal is achieved. For example, as Nuyts demonstrates, in grammar research, a construction-oriented approach and a process-oriented approach are not incompatible, and there is great potential for them to unite and provide complementary perspectives on the same phenomena. The convergence can also be seen in Steen's discussion of metaphor research. He puts forward three dimensions in the diverse and seemingly chaotic area of metaphor studies and on this basis, he systemizes eight areas of research. Of the six chapters contained in this part, only chapter 4 is dedicated to cognitive semantics (i.e. metaphor), with two chapters devoted to lexico-semantics and three to grammar. Moreover, the other two core themes of cognitive semantics (conceptual metonymy and blending) receive little attention. Metonymy, a conceptual operation no less fundamental than metaphor but receive much less attention than metaphor until in recent years (Panther and Radden, 1999) and also showing a converging tendency (see Benczes et al., 2011), surely deserves treatment in a collection like this. The same thing can be said of conceptual blending (see Handl & Schmid, 2011). In addition, chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with theoretical issues while chapters 5-8 focus on the explanation of specific phenomena or the application of theories.

The third part is intended to indicate the expansion of cognitive linguistics to other fields. This expansion makes cognitive linguistics draw nutrition from and/or show benefit to these other areas. It can be seen in terms of methods, theories and new areas of application. First, in terms of methodology, chapter 9 shows how psycholinguistic (experimental) methods can be employed to make claims in metaphor research more substantial; chapters 10 and 11 demonstrate how cognitive linguistic studies can be aided by corpus-based approach. Second, in terms of theories, chapter 12 evaluates conceptual metaphor theories with the affects research tradition founded by Silvan Tomkins; chapter 13 shows how the conceptual construal approach of cognitive linguistics can benefit from taking social construction theory into account. Thirdly, in terms of application, chapter 14 applies cognitive linguistic theories and methods to the interpretation of biblical story, demonstrating the explanatory power of cognitive linguistics on the one hand, and bringing a new perspective to the phenomenon. Of course, apart from what has been mentioned, there are many other methods (e.g. audio and videographic analysis, see Gonzalez-Marquez et al., 2007), other theories (from a wide range of disciplines) and other areas of application for cognitive linguists to explore. That said, as the editors suggests in their introduction, "the chapters do not cover all possibilities of either convergence or expansion, whether already existing ones, or ones that may appear especially through the integration of cognitive linguistics with psycholinguistics and neuroscience, or further research on societal mechanisms" (p.2).

All in all, this volume is a valuable resource and highly recommended to specialists not only in cognitive linguistics, but also in other sub-branches of cognitive science as well.

REFERENCES Harder, Peter. 2010. Meaning in Mind and Society. A Functional Contribution to the Social Turn in Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter Mouton.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER Fan Zhen-qiang is a lecturer in linguistics at Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou, China. He obtained his doctoral degree in the Center for the Study of Language and Cognition, Zhejiang University, China. In 2008, he was a visiting PhD at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (Uil-Ots), Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His research interests lie in the areas of cognitive linguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis.